 Boom, great episode coming at you right now. We're talking specifically to people who need to lose a lot of weight. Very challenging, we feel for you. We've trained a lot of clients in this situation. And because this episode is targeting people who need to lose a lot of weight, the giveaway is gonna help reflect that. So here's the giveaway for today, Maps Starter. This is the best Maps program to start your resistance training journey. This is if you don't work out now, you're new to exercise, you haven't worked out in a while, you wanna know how to get started. Maps Starter is the perfect program. We're giving away for free. Here's how you can get that discount. Oh, excuse me, here's how you can get it for free. Leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode. Subscribe to this channel and turn on your notifications, gotta do all those things. If we like your comment, we'll notify you and you'll get free access to Maps Starter. Also, we're still in the middle of our Black Friday sale. In fact, it ends tomorrow. Huge sale, 60% off all workout programs and all bundles. Everything is on sale, 60% off. So if you wanna sign up for something or you wanna get multiple products, head over to mapsfitnessproducts.com and then just use the code Black Friday, no space. It works on everything. Again, 60% off, site wide. All right, here comes the show. I have one for us to discuss today. Cassie's messaged me a few times about this and I think we've kind of loosely talked about this topic, but I don't think we've actually sat down I don't know, organized our thoughts on like a methodical approach on how we may help somebody in this case. And that is how to lose 100 pounds. Oh yeah. And I know obviously all of us have trained lots of clients in our time of being trainers that have needed to lose 100 pounds. And I would say that this rule, even though the title will be like 100 pounds, it really applies to probably anything 50 and above, right? I mean, it really, once you start getting 50, 60, 70, 100 pounds plus over, it's a little bit more of a special case than somebody who's just trying to shred down 10 pounds that they put on from the holidays or something. Yeah, I know we've talked a lot about like ways people, you know, like negative ways that people have approached this in terms of like the wrong methods applied, but we haven't really been able to take time to kind of, how would we put all this together? So I think that is important to stress. Probably one of the most challenging categories of clients that I would say I'd ever worked with because yes, it's a lot of weight to lose. And yes, the way you lose weight in terms of the, I guess the steps or the mechanics of it are the same if you only lose 20 pounds or if you only lose 100 pounds, but that completely ignores the real psychological and behavioral challenges that we're dealing with when you have to lose this much weight. And this is just the reality. I've worked with a lot of clients and at one point I had quite a few clients and I know you guys did too. I think the gym that we all worked at at one point. It was right next to a bariatric clinic. Yeah, so and you're dealing with, I mean, at one point I think, you know, if you're 30 pounds overweight, 40 pounds and it starts to climb, you enter into a different mental state and you start to kind of like, okay, I don't care. And this is just how I live. And it's very, very challenging once the person makes a decision and says, okay, this is enough. I wanna reverse out of this. It's a hard position to be in because it requires some big lifestyle changes, which are not easy. I wanna be very clear. Changing your nutrition is hard for anybody because how we eat is very closely connected to our personalities and who we are and our emotions and how we celebrate. Food is much more than just nutrition and calories. It's connected to so many different things and activity also, you know, how we move throughout the day, how we structure our day. Like these are all intricate components of how we live and changing them radically and then trying to make it stick. Very, very, very, very challenging. I'm very passionate too about this specific conversation. And a lot of that has to do with, I think the most popular conversation around this is had by the biggest loser show which is Terrible Example. Yeah, and I think they do a really terrible job. Although people that watch it are inspired and it makes for good TV. I remember very clearly when that show first aired, I was a trainer and the wave of people that I got in. And so there's the positive side. It motivated some people to get off the couch, head into a gym, potentially get a gym membership and hire a trainer. But the only problem is I now had to overcome this hurdle of this expectation of, in the next three months, can we drop this 100 pounds? Because they did it on Biggest Loser and they were so inspired that I wanna do that. I saw them do it. I'm tired of being this way and I'm here to invest in you and let's do this. And I struggled with that. I struggled with that for the first couple of years on how to communicate this the right way. And over time I've learned how to do that but at the beginning it was a challenge because there was so much energy around that show that people wanted to train that way. Well, we gotta be very clear, okay? Losing the 100 pounds, okay? I know it's gonna sound kinda crazy. That's the easy part. Not saying it's easy, but of the whole formula, that's the easy part. The hard part is keeping it off forever. Way more people, a much greater percentage of people lose 100 pounds than are actually able to keep it off. The fail rate on all weight loss is something close to 90%, 80 to 90%. It's gotta be higher for this kind of weight loss because of its challenge and all of the things that we're gonna talk about today in terms of all the challenges that you encounter. The biggest loser, in my opinion, was terrible because not only did they do it the wrong way but they made people think that the happy ending at the end is I lost 100 pounds, right? We don't know what happened five or 10 years later and that's the challenge. So how do we fix that? Is it, do we lose the weight and then figure out how to keep it off after? That's what a lot of people do, right? They think, listen, I'll lose the weight first and then I'll figure out how to keep it off. Oh, I even had, I had people that were like teachers and they came in like literally trying to map it out. Like listen, I don't have to work for the next three months. This is what I wanna do with you or I even had some people say I have all this time saved up. I'm gonna take my vacation time all together so all I can do is come and they wanted me to train them five days a week and as much as possible. Cream as a bubble. No, it did, it really did. The positive thing is it got a lot of people to take action and come into the gym. The negative thing that it did is it completely distorted reality. Explanations, reality and you're absolutely right. And so it's not the wrong approach is I'll lose the weight and then I'll figure out how to keep it off after. The right approach is the way that I lose the weight is gonna determine how well or how easy or how sustainable it is afterwards. So it's everything depends on how you get there because that will determine how easy it is to stay where you're at. So it's very important and I do wanna say this, people are gonna, I know people are gonna wanna know timeline, well then how long should it take? A year at least. Give yourself at least a year to lose 100 pounds. Now that's not because you can't physically lose more weight faster but losing weight faster typically results in a far more negative impact on the metabolism and we'll get into that. In other words, at the end of a fast weight loss, you're probably gonna end up like a lot of people on the biggest loser where they lost 100 pounds but now in order to maintain that 100 pound weight loss they're eating 1500 calories a day and working out like crazy every single day which is just, it's not sustainable by the way that's not sustainable for me and I'm a fitness fanatic let alone the average person, let alone somebody that struggled with weight to the point where they had to lose 100 pounds. So number one, it's got a negative effect on the metabolism. Number two, psychologically, mentally, emotionally speaking making radical changes all at once that would result in faster weight loss far more likely to result in weight gain afterwards. So it's a slow, steady process both for you physically but also for you emotionally and mentally and again, if you do this the right way your success rate long-term goes through the roof you do this the wrong way, you can almost guarantee in fact, if I had to bet money and if there was a way to bet on this and if I saw people lose 100 pounds in three months I'd be a billionaire because I would always bet that they'd gain the weight back because that's how guaranteed it is. Well to kinda piggyback on the whole biggest loser thing that I had the biggest problem with is everything became a race and again to the expectation part is like there's so much urgency because they're faced with this realization that I have this weight is not benefiting me my health is deteriorating like this is all the entire thing that's on my mind right now so if I'm not losing weight almost immediately I feel like I'm not doing well I'm not doing good enough and so to kind of deprogram that mindset and try to do things that benefit their body for the long term and build strength and apply adequate amount of calories so that way it's not like this crash dieting situation like all of these things were really hard barriers to overcome. I've had a lot of clients lose a lot of weight and I've had a lot of them gain the weight back but the ones that kept it off were the ones where it took some time where they took their time the changes that we made were slow and steady we came from a good place which I wanna get to as well and I mean I had one woman lose over 120 pounds it took her over two and a half years but it was a slow really good effective process that came from the right place now this woman became a trainer she literally became a personal trainer at the end of this journey I've had people lose 100 pounds with bariatric surgeries and extreme dieting and they all gained it back so I really wanna make that point by the way a year is gone so fast so don't think it sounds forever I know right now especially if you're watching this and you're thinking yourself like I'm ready I wanna do this right now and you're like oh my gosh Sal says it's a year it's not as long as you think especially in comparison to the rest of your life well I've seen both case scenarios with different clients who just really would take my advice but also would like add onto that on their own and they just kept doing like an exorbitant amount of cardio and would lower their calories substantially and they'd lose weight really fast versus the other client that would listen and we'd kinda draw it out a little further the one that drew it out a little further because it was paced out and it was a bit slower was able to really identify their own behaviors like learned a lot about themselves in terms of what the triggers were like what the root of all of it was and this is something that just gets overlooked when you're just on this horse blinder approach where you're not gonna take ownership of the journey well this is the main reason why 85% plus put the weight back on is because this wasn't just a calories in, calories out problem and I think it's looked at like that very often that's how the biggest loser addresses it less food, make them burn a ton of calories watch them lose weight and the reason why it's not successful long term is because you never address the root cause and that's why I think it's perfect that you listed the very first tip of the 10 tips on how to do this is hiring a therapist or enlisting someone that you trust and that you know loves you and that really is there for that emotional support and to help you do the work, the internal work. Totally, first off this has to come from a place of self love and self care and often I would say most of the time doesn't most of the time this comes from this initial motivation oh my God I'm 100 pounds overweight I need to lose weight comes from a place of self hate, shame, disgust I can't believe I've let myself get to this point I'm so impulsive, why can't I just why is this such an issue for me? I'm a bad person or whatever I'm a bad person I'm fat like what and so it comes from this place of self hate and when you approach this struggle or this journey from a place of self hate everything you do is a punishment exercise is a punishment, diet is a punishment it's restrictive I deserve this I can't eat that I have to go move this is what I deserve and I'll tell you something self hate is very powerful in the short term terrible in the long term in the short term you hate yourself you're gonna make some crazy changes and the long term at some point at some point you're gonna wanna improve your quality of life because you're not gonna wanna hate yourself anymore and that's when you fall off at some point you're gonna say to yourself you know what I deserve to eat that cake or you know what I need you know I just wanna live my life I just wanna enjoy my life boy the last six months have sucked right which is interesting considering exercising improving your health eating right to improve your health should be a quality of life enhancer not a quality of life destroyer but if it comes from a place of self hate that's exactly what it's gonna do so you gotta say to yourself this and you can be very honest I haven't been taking care of myself very well for a long time and I'm someone that deserves to be taken care of I care about me I'm gonna do what's right for me I'm gonna take care of myself and what helps with that is a licensed therapist because you're gonna go back and forth between self hate and self love sounds easy the self love part sounds easy it's not it's really hard because you're gonna want to hate yourself you're gonna want to be shameful especially as you start to tackle the challenges that have gotten in front of you in the past and you're gonna wanna say to yourself like why didn't I do this before and God I can't believe I did that and why did I screw up on my diet and so a good therapist can help you with this and the clients that I've worked with who've lost a substantial amount of weight who did very well I got them to work with a therapist if you can't afford a licensed there by the way once a week with a therapist would be good for most people but if you can't afford that involve somebody you care about that you know truly cares about you so who's this person this is a person that shares in your successes that they celebrate with your successes and they mourn your losses this is a person that's not gonna judge you but it's gonna be honest to you they're not gonna give you nutrition and fitness advice you don't want nutrition and fitness advice from a non-expert okay because this person might care about you and they might give you the wrong advice so don't worry about that but what you want is emotional support someone you can call and I get on the phone and I'm like man Justin you know this whole journey I'm on it's really hard and I had a terrible weekend let me tell you what I did I woke up in the morning and I know I was supposed to go on a walk instead I watched TV I opened up a bag of I went to the store bought a bag of cookies ate the whole damn thing and then it was crazy from there and then I did this and I did that and then Justin who I know because I enlisted somebody that really cares about me is on the other line saying look that sucks I'm sorry you went through that you're gonna do okay like I care about you I know you care about you right you're gonna make it through you're gonna make it through that's the kind of support that you're looking for and that makes a big difference if you can afford it a therapist is even better of course because you know what a therapist can do even better than what Justin just said back to you is a therapist is gonna help you dig deeper into why of course and that's what I mean that that's their profession they know how to do that well and then and also how to be that support on cover some trauma or some other things that 100% and that's so key is that you have somebody that helps you get again to the root cause the other type of person that I see that's really successful with this too is and it's the second step is the ditching the motivation hype and understanding the importance of discipline and habits yes again this is another thing this is another knock at Biggest Loser and another reason why I don't like that show is that it's very I mean I've tuned in on it and I get goose bumps when all the hugging and the emotional and the playbacks of the memories and they do such a good job of giving you the the feels initially but the problem with that is it's fleeting you know you're the happy sad and motivated and that's that go that ebb and flows all the time and if you're going to have long term success you need to build habits and discipline and routine and rituals in order to be consistent and I can understand why people are so obsessed with motivation because it's feels good it's easy feels good yeah like when you're motivated like when you're motivated you don't you don't need to talk yourself into working out like when you're motivated you're gonna make the best you know quote unquote best food choices right because you're motivated like when I'm motivated man I work my ass off I do everything I need to I'm a great dad I'm a great husband I'm cleaning the yard like I'm motivated right that's not the hard part okay the hard part is when that feeling which is fleeting nobody's permanently motivated doesn't work that way right when that feeling is gone that's when the challenge happens now what do I do so how do we go around how do we get around feelings because feelings we're human we've got all kinds of feelings it's wrapped all up in that discipline discipline means you do it anyway okay so that sounds easy well how do I build discipline like any skill you start very small and you build upon it so a good example would be this this is how I always explain it because it's the easiest way to kind of understand it you want to have a very honest conversation with your unmotivated self so if you're motivated right now and you're watching this place yourself in the mindset of when you're not motivated because our motivated selves we overshoot always you ask somebody who's motivated you know how big do you think you can build your business and it's going to be some crazy number versus when they're not feeling so hyped right so put yourself in an unmotivated state of mind and then ask yourself the following what changes can I make now that I feel relatively confident I can do forever and also it still needs to be a little bit challenging okay here's why if it's not challenging it has no meaning it's not going to mean anything to you but it also needs to be realistic forever because you don't want to have a lot of failures on your plate you want to be able to have these little successes so this means it's different from person to person someone may be watching this and may say to themselves it's very realistic for me to not eat sweets every single day so I'm going to avoid sweets someone else might say that is not realistic for me I'm going to avoid sweets you know three days a week or someone might say I'm only going to you know I'm going to walk every single day or someone else might say I'm going to walk two days a week you have to create small habits that are realistic yet challenging once that habit becomes a habit once it becomes an actual habit and you're doing consistently then you add upon it and that's how you build the skill of discipline and that's what the long-term approach looks like in a sense and that's why it's so important for you to establish the right mindset going in and be real with yourself and realize is that reasonable can I replace all the soda in my diet with you know something a little bit more healthy for me you know more water can I just focus on that as one thing I know I can do this every single day even though sometimes I'm going to want soda but I know that this is going to be a challenge but I could definitely do just that one thing I have to pick what those few things are and then run with that for you know a few months and really see the transformation happen in the momentum so you build that slow momentum that you can add to and it's going to stay moving forward instead of trying to take it all on at once and that's where you do need motivation you really can't take everything on at once without motivation that's a real difficult one I had a client just to give you an example of what I mean I literally had a client that and we had this real honest conversation and the first step was for her to read one page out of a nutrition book so it was like we had to just go all the way back well can you do this can you do that and she's like well that's not realistic that's not realistic do you think you could read a page out of this book every single day I'll start there and here's what happened she did it she did it consistently then she came to me and said I'm ready for the next one and then we slowly built upon it by the way this accelerates it's a snowball effect discipline builds upon discipline so it's not it might start off slow but it starts to accelerate and each step becomes bigger and bigger so that's the that's kind of the light at the end of the tunnel the next step is probably one of the most difficult or the biggest mind fuck of all the steps and definitely one of the hardest challenges I had as a trainer communicating this information because you get somebody who comes in and that is to focus on strength and not the weight loss at first and that's really hard getting stronger right you get somebody who comes in and they're like Adam I want to lose 100 pounds and especially if they've been watching shows like Biggest Loser all they want to do and talk about did I lose five this week oh next week we're trying to lose 10 and trying to beat their weight loss where I'm trying to get them to completely reframe that and say hey we're not really going to pay attention to the scale what I want you to pay attention to if we're going to watch any metric right now is are we getting stronger in the gym and explaining to them the importance of us building strength building muscle to speed up your metabolism so that when we do lose this 100 pounds we keep it off for the rest of your life yeah they actually did a study years ago there was a belief that if you were really if you were severely obese you also had more muscle mass and they showed in studies that that's not true the severely obese also have low muscle mass just like anybody else who doesn't you know work out they still have low muscle mass so building strength is a couple things one it builds muscle which speeds up your metabolism that's very important because it would be wonderful if you had a faster metabolism at the end of your 100 pound weight loss goal which is possible then you went into imagine being able to eat more after you lost 100 pounds imagine eating more but you're smaller right what happens often is a reverse they lose the weight now they get like nothing and they gotta work out a time to keep it off imagine if you could eat more and you could do that by focusing on building strength the second reason is strength is a wonderful metric because you have to nourish yourself and you have to be somewhat healthy to see strength gains whereas just to see the scale move down we could do a lot of things wrong and get you to lose weight we can make you very unhealthy and make you lose weight with strength it's a lot harder like if you're in the gym you're like okay I did two push-ups off my knees and then oh I could do three push-ups off my knees like you're getting stronger it's a very positive signal that you're moving in the right direction by the way one of the biggest challenges that you have when you have a lot of weight to lose is your body starts to lose sensitivity to insulin okay so your body has to produce more and more insulin to get your to do the functions that it does in the body and this can lead to eventually diabetes and it can definitely contribute to more fat gain and all that stuff okay one of the best ways to improve insulin sensitivity is just to build a little bit of muscle you don't even have to lose weight they've got studies on this where they get the severely obese they have them build a little bit of muscle and they get significantly improved insulin sensitivity scores so you're also optimizing your hormones to a level to a degree by building a little bit of strength so when you go to the gym and you are exercising focus on getting stronger it's a much healthier and much more effective approach especially initially well and two I think that this type of a client didn't really realize as well that focusing on building strength was a great way to alleviate pain as well totally and you know and I get that too like there's this thought that just losing the weight is going to you know solve a lot of my joint pain solve a lot of the way that you know I move because I'll be lighter but at the same time you need strength you need strength support you need stability around your joints and if you can work on that it's going to have you know an even better long lasting effect of pain relief the four step which is one of my favorite things to teach a client and I think it's one of the easiest things to show them and then to get them to start building the discipline and the habit and the routines around just to increase activity through through daily habits so instead of this you know one hour session of walking or running on a treadmill like a hamster on a hamster wheel I'm encouraging you to do these short ten minute walks here or you know park further away at the grocery store when you do this or choose to use the stairs instead of the elevator this makes a big difference people don't think it does it makes a huge difference it makes a huge difference because what happens a lot of times you get a client that has put on this much extra weight along with that has also become a more and more sedentary lifestyle where you know and I've done this where I've tracked their steps and kind of looked at the average where they start heading and they're talking about people that are only stepping 1500 to maybe 4,000 steps an entire day which is literally if you were to go outside and walk for an hour straight just walking you would accumulate more than 4,000 steps I mean that's how that's for the whole day that's for the whole day they're hitting those numbers or less, right and they could string multiple days together so how do I help them find little ways to just add more activity that doesn't feel like they're doing a lot but I know over time that that will start to add up and it will also start to back to like the last or the two points before it'll start to help build that momentum off those small little achievable goals and before you know it this person who was sitting around only moving 1500, 2000 steps a day is now doing 8,000 steps a day and it doesn't feel like they're exercising they've just changed some habits in their life yeah the reason why this is so effective isn't because it's a magical like new way to burn calories it's literally the psychological effect it's much easier to stay consistent when you've attached increased activity to normal daily habits so an example would be I'm going to walk for 10 minutes after breakfast lunch and dinner, right that's just a simple example now I eat breakfast and lunch and dinner every single day so if I attach it to those meals I'm more likely to do it versus oh I gotta do my 30 minutes of cardio on the treadmill I have to schedule it out gotta put on my my sweats gotta get on the treadmill and block off this time instead it's just I eat breakfast now I'm gonna go walk around the block for 10 minutes another way to do it like you said if you go to the grocery store and you go let's say you go to the grocery store every single day by the way I never thought this made that big of a difference until newer technology came out we were able to track calories burn in steps and then I had clients start doing this kind of stuff I used to scoff at this when I would hear trainers say oh take the stairs or park far away like oh gosh that's so dumb just get on a treadmill the reality is it's extremely effective I would have clients park at the end of the parking lot and they go to the grocery store every day and it was like they did and you know you'd see it adds up or yeah I work on the second floor I don't take the elevator now I take the stairs or I had a client once one thing that she did what I thought was brilliant is she said I you know I take a bathroom break every other hour or so to go pee now instead of going to the bathroom that's on my floor I walk up a flight of stairs and go to the bathroom on the next floor and that's all she did and it jumped her steps by a couple thousand a day just from doing something like that well that was the cool part about some of these you know tools like Fitbit and Bodybug and all that kind of just revealed some of the daily habits and like where you're most sedentary and so we kind of got into that a bit and found some of my clients like a natural tendency was after working you know even if it's a desk job and they're working and they're sitting all day like you get tired right and so the first thing you want to do and get home is sit down you know kick your feet up watch TV and so just you know actively making that a priority to like come in you know walk around make sure you don't like sit down right away and you know it doesn't happen that reward you as a result and it just it builds it builds momentum you know in terms of like activity just you feel more energized as well. The fifth one is a tip that I think is pretty easy to implement and I believe that this is also responsible for one of the one of the number one culprits for people's weight gain is sugar drinks right so making it a habit to be black coffee and avoiding all drinks that are loaded with calories you're better off eating your calories and drinking them and it's it's a very simple thing to get people to implement it's not it's not a huge leap to ask them to do that is to cut out all the calorie drinks but again it's one of those things it sneaks up so fast you don't realize how much of a role it's playing in this excess calories I'm going to add to that Adam and I'll say this and you feel yourself cringe a little bit or shrink up a little bit and look I understand this I've had I've had many clients like I had clients that tell me they didn't like the taste of water because that's how much soda and flavor drinks that they had so here's another way to do it so here's another strategy that I think for some people is even more effective instead of thinking to yourself I'm only going to drink water think to yourself I'm going to aim for a gallon of water a day that's why I love that so instead of instead of saying I'm only drinking water you're saying I have to hit a gallon of water now the side effect of hitting a gallon of water naturally replaces those other drinks you're not going to have room to drink all that other stuff this is why we on a recent podcast we talked about that arbitrary number that's been out there forever and there's a lot of fitness professionals that have shit all over that advice saying that oh there's gallon of water it's so individualized and that's more than enough for most people and it's a stupid piece of advice and I disagree for that exact reason that I have found the clients that I made pay attention and track their water they're so worried about hitting their target and peeing that they don't have time to drink mocha frappuccinos and sugar drinks because it's hard to get that much water in a day it also curbs a lot of cravings which is something that I think people mix signals a lot of times that I'm really hungry right now are like when in fact they're actually like thirsty they need to be hydrating yeah so literally what you can do this is really easy again if that drink only water statement makes you go off buy a gallon or half gallon container or whatever fill it up and then that's your target okay this is what I'm going to drink for the whole day and just pay attention to it throughout the day and again the side effect of that and I've seen it time and time again is that people just don't drink their calories because they got to hit that gallon of water every single day it makes a huge for people who drink calories avoiding the calories and drinks in my experience calories cut from a person's diet but you don't have to think of it that way you don't have to think to yourself I'm cutting calories all you're thinking is I'm only drinking water or I have to hit that gallon of water target well it also helps with the point that Justin actually just alluded to which is the avoiding heavily processed food so the six tip is to avoid and stay away from that drinking the water throughout the day does start to curb those cravings and that's one I've ever got a client I'm not going to make you count calories I'm not going to weigh and measure food I'm simply just going to say stop eating the shit that's in a wrapper in a box make sure you make your food eat whole foods I'm not worried about how much of it you're consuming right now when you're hungry eat just choose from those whole foods and it's amazing how much weight people lose just simply by doing that now there's nothing inherently you know magical about whole natural foods and now your body wants to burn body fat although whole foods tend to be healthier that's true but that's not the reason why we're saying this the reason why we're saying avoid heavily processed foods is because processed or engineered foods are specifically designed to make you eat more and they're super effective at doing so and we have studies now to support this there's several studies now and they're well done studies that show when people are criticized of a lot of heavily processed foods they eat on average 600 more calories a day versus when they're also told eat until you're satisfied but you can only eat whole natural foods they eat 600 calories less so rather than counting calories and cutting your food intake you can say to yourself I'm gonna eat until I'm satisfied I'm just gonna avoid the foods that are designed to make me overeat so I'm just gonna avoid heavily processed foods or chicken or steak or tuna fish and you're having some fruit and some vegetables and you can make it tasty I don't care do whatever you want with it but you're gonna eat less naturally because it doesn't it isn't engineered to make you overeat you'll naturally cut your calories the best part is you don't have to think about cutting your calories you don't feel like you're restricting you don't feel like you're restricting I've done the same thing Adam I've literally told clients and I love it because it's like a magic trick that I pull and all you gotta do is not eat heavily processed foods and they look at me like I'm crazy I can eat as much as I want but absolutely eat as much as you want just avoid heavily processed foods and they always come back with weight loss as a result because again those foods are engineered to make you overeat and they're really good at doing so now brings us to the next one now this is a very important piece of the self-awareness that is required to do what we're about to do and that's create barriers between yourself and your impulses ok so think to yourself what are my impulsive tendencies when it comes to overeating well if I have snacks at my desk while I'm working I tend to eat a whole bunch of them like you know if I have a bowl of peanuts or if I have you know crackers or whatever while I'm working I end up eating a whole bunch of them so what you need to do in that scenario and there's many scenarios where people have impulsive kind of behaviors is you just create a barrier to yourself I'm I can't snack say to yourself if I want a cracker I gotta walk all the way over to the break room and have some or better I have to go all the way to the grocery store cause I don't care to do my house and I'm gonna call out some people that I guarantee that are thinking in their head cause this used to be the number one excuse when I tell my clients this cause it always would blow my mind by the way I don't know if you guys did this enough but with this and it always would blow my mind when I look at these clients that tell me that they're struggling with weight loss and they can't make these decisions and I go look at their cupboards and I go well that's because you don't fucking have a single good choice like everything in here is a bad choice and then the number one response I would get is I have kids which used to drive me crazy as a trainer is that what a terrible reason for you to excuse having nut butters and ice cream and all the chips and all that like you should be feeding your children this what you're eating and there's nothing wrong with them eating whole foods and they're going to eat whatever you eat and one of the easiest barriers that you can start to put up is simply not buying it by not putting in your house and you're not telling yourself you can't have it right if you really want that bag of chips get off your ass drive to the grocery store park far away walk into the grocery store go get your chips and come back and you know what watch how many people won't do it but you know what sometimes you will but most of the time you're not going to and when it cut with this is that you you probably have a family or you live with people you're making these changes for yourself everyone else is going to be like why do we got to make these changes right so it's challenging and you're going to get complaints there are other snacks you can get that aren't nearly as impulse creating or nearly as engineered to make your over eight cheese sticks you can have some nuts I like nuts and shells so rather than buying peanuts I'll buy peanuts in the shell why the shell is a barrier I have to break it open before I eat it right high quality beef jerky beef jerky fruit so your kids like I want snacks we can go in the cupboard and see what we have where's all the cookie I don't have any today but we got the cheese sticks we got some of these nuts they may complain but that's okay they still have those snacks but it does create a barrier between you and that impulse another one would be just like trigger foods I'll use myself as an example potato chips potato chips for me if there's chips around it's like I'm an alcohol a recovering alcoholic and I'm at a bar like it's just it's so it's just calling my name I want to have them and it becomes a test of willpower so I never have chips in my house does that mean I never buy a bag of chips no if I really want them I'll say you know what I don't say to myself I can't have them I'll say I'll go to the grocery store and buy myself a serving I'll buy myself a small serving bag of potato chips not the big family bag so there's lots of ways you can create barriers between yourself and certain behaviors so you're not telling yourself no what you're doing is you're creating space now why is the space so important because impulsive behaviors happen before awareness they happen before you have the time to logically think about something because if you say to yourself man my trigger foods are cookies it's in my house get up and eat it by the time I'm done I think to myself ah man what did I do that but if I say they're not here I want those cookies I gotta go put my shoes on put on my jacket get in the car by the time I'm doing all this I have time to think I have time to process I have time to say to myself do I really want those bad enough to get them and oftentimes the answer is no yeah and two you gotta be mindful about you know when you're actually eating food and so the speed at which you're eating the food so we're talking about a lot of these types of snacky food where it's really easy to just like wolf it down like super quick or I I go and I do what you say and I create that barrier but I go get it and then I'm eating it in my car super fast and I always feel like I have to have something on hand but to really take that time out and devote special time to slow down to slow your breathing down to chew all your food all the way through and I've said this a couple of times but it made a big impact on me so I used to eat food so fast and I had to wash it down and so it's it's just taking that extra amount of time so your body catches up it gets the signal that oh actually I'm full and I don't need to keep cramming in anything else they've made an entire diet around chewing your food so there's I forget it works I forgot what the name of the book was but I'll never forget the first time that I saw it and it's like it's like 52 chews or something like that where if you chewed every bite like 52 times like you would lose it's a mindfulness practice that's all it is it's the mindful practice that that's really doing it reminds me also of the the Paul check experience that we had where he prayed before where he wasn't praying because the guy doesn't pray really but his meditating above his food before we ate it also reminds me too of the tip that I used to give clients where I'd say listen I'm not going to tell you what you can or can't eat all I'm going to say is don't do it in front of your phone and in front of the TV and it would be mind blowing how much that would restrict people from eating we see what they're doing and they become aware of what's going on when you're distracted when you're distracted by the television you're distracted by your phone you know they've done studying on this you'll eat something like 15 to 20 percent more calories when you're watching TV on your phone or distracted while you eat you also eat faster when you're doing those things and you have food so a very easy way to be mindful is to say to yourself when I eat I have to sit down at a table so I'm not at my desk on the couch I'm at a table no phone no television me and my food and I chew my food and I put my fork down and I eat mindfully and even if you say to yourself I'm not going to cut anything I'm not going to restrict anything I'm going to eat as much as I want studies are consistent on this they show that you eat less as a result simply by being mindful and if you really are honest for yourself really honest and you think of the times you over ate you were not being mindful in those periods of time also all you got to do is create that space for mindfulness to happen well also consider your digestive system and I know for me I used to suffer from acid reflux a lot and yes it was partially due to certain types of foods and grains and sugar and what not in the diet that I was able to parse out but a lot of it had to do with speed and also being in a stressed state and so if I'm hovering over my food and I'm trying to get it in well people are yelling and you know that affected me to where I would actually feel the effects almost immediately I would get acid reflux well that's part of the digestive process right that's the first initial part is the chewing up of the food in fact Doug just pulled up the book the book was 32 chews not 52 and it's not only to improve for weight loss but also the digestive process and it's amazing I remember the first time I saw it I'm like that's so silly and then I started kind of counting just to see like how many and I was like holy shit I don't chew my food anywhere close to 32 times and it just feels weird to be it takes a while oh it does it takes a while to do it but what an interesting hack right of just hey I'm not going to tell you what you can eat or whatever just literally chew every bite 32 times go to town whatever you want you just gotta chew it 32 times before you swallow it watch what happens and I think that's just amazing you know along the lines of food something that I think is and we talked about this recently in our Thanksgiving tips and stuff that we gave and I think I alluded to this in that episode that I said this is something that I've adopted year-round for how I eat and that is to prioritize protein is when you sit down and you're about to eat and you look at your plate regardless if you're eating out or you're eating at home is to eat first protein which is very counter-intuitive with how Americans are served food we typically go starch first yeah bread comes out chips and guac come out like all these starchy foods come out first and then you get to the protein and you're already stuffed from all these appetizers and so it's just a switch and it's not saying you can't have the chips it's not saying you can't have the bread it's just saying hey eat all of your meat first eat all of your protein first and then go there and it's amazing how few of calories you consume just because you went that way first protein is satiating again studies are clear on this that on a gram per gram basis when you compare protein to carbohydrates or proteins to fats proteins create more fullness and more satiety in the body so prioritizing it sets yourself up to not overeat later on not to mention proteins are very important macronutrient for building that strength and that metabolism that we're trying to build and protein often comes with a little bit of fat so if I'm eating steak or chicken or fish it's going to come with some fat which are both essential proteins and fats are essential macronutrients meaning you have to eat them just to be alive carbohydrates are non-essential now I'm not saying that they're not desirable or they don't have their own benefits just saying they're not essential like if you had to only pick two macronutrients to survive it would be proteins and fat so proteins first then move on to everything else prioritize those proteins you'll hit your protein targets you're going to be satisfied faster and you'll eat less calories not only that by the way and this is a small effect so I'm always a tread lightly when I communicate this but protein also has more of a thermic effect than other macronutrients meaning your body burns more calories through protein than it does through fats and carbohydrates now it's a small effect so this isn't the answer it's just another little thing that sells eating protein first and prioritizing it now I want to make the point that we've gone over nine different tips for you to lose a hundred pounds and we have yet to address any sort of tracking food or macros or calorie counting whatsoever and I do like that we put this in here but we put it in as the tenth and the final tip or final step to this whole process and there was a reason behind that because I think you can get pretty damn far if not all the way for a lot of people without ever having to weigh, measure or track calories whatsoever now that being said I do think there's tremendous value if you have the affordability to hire a nutritionist to help you with your relationship food with food during this process and make sure that you're getting what your body needs yeah it's good to know what's in food what's not in food what portions how many calories typical portions look like the reason why we didn't say track your calorie because it could have been like this right we could have done this very mechanistic approach and said okay figure out how many calories you're burning you know cut your calories by this much burn extra you know x amount more calories you'll lose weight the problem is that counting calories and tracking is very triggering to people especially people who need to lose over a hundred pounds it's very much a low oh I do it now I hate it and I don't want to do it ever again and I'm gonna go in the opposite direction so the nine steps we said before help work on the behaviors they help work on the relationships you have with yourself with food and with exercise once you kind of feel good with that then you can get into starting to track and really understand macro nutrients proteins, fats, carbs and calories because it is an important thing to kind of know what's in your food but you do want to build a little bit of a base before you get there hiring a nutritionist or somebody who is a professional that works with people like yourself so somebody that is experienced working with people who need to lose a hundred pounds who does very well who will also work with your therapist ideally is a good approach at this not an online bikini coach do not hire fitness influencers I'm so glad you said that I'm serious you want to damage your body hire an influencer or you want to make your relationship to yourself with yourself and food worse hire one of those idiots plus educating yourself in general I mean it's empowering right you need to all of these steps bring about self-awareness and this is just another piece to that that helps you to really identify what you seek out where that lines up in terms of the amount of calories you're consuming you have more leverage going forward in terms of how to navigate your way around a lot of these things it does take more discipline and that's why it's at the bottom this is one of those things it scares a lot of people it seems daunting but you'll find going through this process like wow I can do a lot and I can take more on now and so this is just one more thing that will help to you know make everything else seem easier because you really have the knowledge now going forward the irony of this is that the science would support that this would be the first thing that you would do of course because the science is all about losing the 100 pounds but not about keeping it off resting metabolic rate we got to nail that down you know and then we go from there and we got to figure out our maintenance calories and that's why I love that we agreed that it obviously plays a significant role right all the studies wouldn't support it if it didn't have a significant role in the success of losing 100 pounds but as far as the priorities from our experience of training lots and lots of people in the situation the nine steps before are far more important that you get those established and you hit those out the park before you move into this space and not the other way around yeah I'm glad you said that and you know before we sign off I do want to say one more thing right be kind to yourself you're probably your most harsh critic and the person that's probably meanest to you can be you so be very kind to yourself because this is not going to be a linear progression you're not going to get better and better and better every single day there's going to be setbacks that's what you need to forgive yourself be kind forget the shame part it's a hard journey but you will get there look if you like our information and you want more free information from Mind Pump head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out all of our free guides you can also find all of us on Instagram so Justin can be found at Mind Pump Justin you can find me at Mind Pump Sal and you can find Adam at Mind Pump Adam